AMCC - Applied Micro Circuits Corporation

In 2004, AMCC bought assets, IP and engineers concerning the PowerPC 400 microprocessors from IBM for $227 million and they now market the processors under their own name. The deal also included access to IBM’s SoC design methodology and advanced CMOS process technology.

In 2009, AppliedMicro changed their branding from AMCC to AppliedMicro, but still retain the name “Applied Micro Circuits Corporation” officially.

In 2011, AppliedMicro became the first company to implement the ARMv8-A architecture with its X-Gene Platform. In November 2012 at ARM TechCon, AppliedMicro demonstrated advanced web search capabilities and the ability to handle big data workloads in an Apache Hadoop software environment with the X-Gene Platform using FPGA emulation. A silicon implementation of X-Gene was first exhibited publicly in June 2013.

In April 2016, information about the forthcoming X-Gene 3 server chips was made available. The release schedule was for the second half of 2017. The company projected an improved performance, over the X-Gene 2, that with allow it to better compete with servers using the x86-64 architecture.

In November 2016, MACOM Technology Solutions announced that they would purchase AppliedMicro. The acquisition was completed on January 26, 2017. MACOM then sold the processor division to the private equity firm The Carlyle Group during October 2017.